Coping With Catastrophe

Government response is only as good as its structure and its assets.

Institutions succeed only if properly organized and adequately funded. On both counts, the federal government is often set up to fail.

Justin Rood's cover story lays out in compelling detail the organizational failings that attended the public health system's response to the displacement, disease and death that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In the many years Government Executive has specialized in covering the federal executive branch, I cannot recall a greater story of bureaucratic disarray.

One could make an argument that the government is prepared, on paper at least, to deal with disasters. After all, it has the Federal Emergency Management Agency assigned to the task and contingency plans for deploying other assets.

Katrina exposed FEMA's deterioration as an effective responder to natural disasters now that it's buried in the terrorism-focused Homeland Security Department. But even in its earlier condition, FEMA would have been overwhelmed. For Katrina was more than a disaster. In bureaucratic terminology, and in reality, it was a catastrophe.

The ballyhooed National Response Plan developed by the executive branch in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks deals only in passing with catastrophe scenarios. A six-page annex to the NRP anticipates the inability of state and local government to cope, and directs federal agencies to deploy assets even in the absence of requests from affected states. But this catastrophe response plan has never been approved by all agencies involved.

Rood documents the complex set of handoffs and buck-passing institutionalized in current government plans for medical emergencies. These seem as difficult to execute as a square dance's dos-à-dos, allemande lefts and half sashays.

And this, of course, is the system on which we would rely to cope with an epidemic like the avian flu threat discussed at some length by President Bush in his recent press conference.

Deficiencies in the nation's public health systems and the threat of pandemics are well-known and fully explored, for example, in prize-winning author Laurie Garrett's books, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Order (Penguin, 1995) and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Hyperion, 2001).

Government owes its very existence to our common need for careful planning to meet security and other challenges large enough to defy individual response. If disappointed in the case of public health, perhaps we can be encouraged to witness careful interagency planning now under way to replace our aging air traffic control system. As Beth Dickey reports, the country will need to spend an estimated $32 billion to complete the job. Unfortunately, Congress has squandered the aviation trust fund on operations instead of saving it, as intended, for capital needs. Here, as in other long-term national infrastructure needs, funding is very difficult to find.

While on the subject, I invite readers to attend our upcoming Executive Luncheon Forum on the budget and spending outlook on Nov. 10. We are pleased to be sponsoring this event and future topical luncheons with the National Academy of Public Administration. Information on the lunches, and on the series of Leadership Breakfasts we also sponsor, can be found at www.govexec.com/events.